A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

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Tuesday, April 25, 2017

NETWORKING

This morning, I read this very interesting and informative piece about Jared Kushner, Trump's increasingly powerful son-in-law. Note in particular the network of connections linking Kushner with such diverse players as Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Glen Beck. Note also the patently deliberate campaign to portray him as the moderating, even liberal, force moving Trump toward respectability. You and I do this politics thing as a sideline, as a hobby, perhaps even as a passion, but we are up against smart people who do it twenty-four hours a day as their profession. The only thing we've got going for us is that there are more of us than there are of them.

6 comments:

Back when we were 17 and discovering Orwell and Dostoyevsky and Plato and Proust, they at the same age (the Jared Kushners and the Hillary Clintons) were already scheming how to get power and money.

We got the learning and even, I'd say, some of the wisdom that those authors can transmit to an open mind, and they got money and power in life.

I have no regrets, at least not about having spent much of my life amongst what used to be called "the great books". I have a few regrets about how I treated some people.

I suspect that those in power are always going to be scheming bastards, although it's better to have scheming bastards in power who support free public healthcare, expanded mass transit, and measures to deal with climate change than those who don't.

Dear S. Wallerstein, you're invoking the old line from The Republic about philosophers and kings, aren't you, with presidents standing in for kings.It makes one wonder of how Socrates would handle Trump in a dialog. Plenty of satrical opportunities too rich to imagine.Though I'm not the man to write such a dialog or to even imagine a title or a crux of discussion

I hadn't consciously thought about Plato. In any case, I'm much more liberal (in the J.S. Mill sense of the term) than Plato is and less of a social perfectionist. I assume that the Jared Kushners and the Hillary Clintons would scheme their way to the top in Plato's Republic, although, I would note, the Donald Trumps probably could not.

Your idea of a dialogue between Socrates and Trump sounds like great comedy!

The Huffington Post is so far left and so radical that it doesn't represent really anything I believe in. For me, this also means that in an ideological divided populace, one out of two will have an allergic reaction to HuffPo. The crown jewel of left-wing journalism. I can't recall how many times I have seen the word "awesome" in a headline.

My point here is not to prefer right bias to left bias. I might not, and furthermore, Huffington won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for national reporting. She is part of Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people and the list of Forbes most Powerful Women. Nevertheless, I wouldn't cite reference to them - their bias is transparent and shallow- I'd be embarrassed to. I get stuck, then, in asking myself what is somebody's answer to this question: 'These are the most credible media sources..?' I come up with The Fake News Codex or such. Heck, Wikipedia. I won't insist on the last word, but I am stuck on the question..

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.